The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick is a dark winter fantasy for 11 year olds about a boy who belongs to a magician. It starts with him folded into a box.<\/p>\n
He is called Boy. That is all. No name, no family, no idea how old he is. He works for the magician Valerian, and tonight his job is to crouch inside a stage cabinet and push his legs out through a flap at exactly the right moment, so that the audience believes Valerian has come apart in the middle.<\/p>\n
Boy gets cramp. He almost misses his cue. He spends the rest of the trick dreading what will happen to him afterwards.<\/p>\n
That tells you most of what you need to know about the two of them. Valerian found Boy years ago, wedged at the top of a pillar in an old church, and kept him largely because he is good at fitting into small spaces.<\/p>\n
Then something shifts. Valerian has thrashed him for far less than a missed cue. Tonight he goes quiet and says it does not matter, which is much more frightening than a beating. Time, he tells Boy, is not on their side.<\/p>\n
The city is wonderfully done. Gutter Street. An alley called Blind Man’s Stick where the roof tiles almost touch overhead. A dry well in the yard where Boy likes to imagine a river running far below him. It is all cold, cramped and lit one candle at a time.<\/p>\n
Worth knowing before you start. This one is properly dark. There has been a run of murders and the bodies are sometimes drained of blood. Graves are being robbed. A character is found dead early on and a girl puts her hand into the blood without realising what it is. Boy himself is held by the throat in a dockside tavern by a man who could snap his neck.<\/p>\n
None of it is dwelt on, but all of it is in the opening chapters, so it is not something a parent can steer around later. A child who likes a shiver and a puzzle will be delighted. A child who worries at bedtime almost certainly will not. I would treat it as one for a confident reader, or one to go through together.<\/p>\n
What carries it is Boy himself. He notices everything, says almost nothing, and works out far more than any adult in the book gives him credit for.<\/p>\n
For the same wintry, superstitious, slightly-too-real feeling, Sedgwick’s The Dark Horse is in the library as well. A girl with no past of her own, found as a child in the hills, a sealed box washed up on a black sand beach, and a village waiting for something terrible to arrive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick is a dark winter fantasy for 11 year olds about a boy who belongs to a magician. It starts with him folded into a box. He is called Boy. That is all. No name, no family, no idea how old he is. He works for the magician […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10663,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8960,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Sedgwick's The Dark Horse","lr_seo_hook":"A nameless boy, a cruel magician and a city where the dead go missing."},"book_tag":[27],"age_group":[28],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[669],"class_list":["post-8862","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-fantasy-books","age_group-books-for-11-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-marcus-sedgwick"],"yoast_title":"The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A nameless boy, a cruel magician and a city where the dead go missing. For ages 11+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n